by reading book after book (the only reliable otherworlds I’ve discovered so far).

I usually start writing a novel that I then abandon. When I say abandon, I don’t think any writer ever abandons anything that they regard as even a half-good sentence. So you recycle. I mean,...

How many times would he disappoint you in a day if you were married to him, Ursula wondered?

The mind is a fathomless mystery.

My father was an autodidact. It wasn’t a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education – he had a horrible childhood. He got...

They said love made you strong, but in Louise’s opinion it made you weak. It corkscrewed into your heart and you couldn’t get it out again, not without ripping your heart to pieces.

Ethics are not necessarily to do with being law-abiding. I am very interested in the moral path, doing the right thing.

My work is not my life. I started writing quite late, I didn’t have that ‘writing is everything, my art is all.’ You have to be able to recognise the difference between the two.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. ‘The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,’ she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. ‘Nonsense, Patricia,’ I tell her as I climb on...

I’m trying to take more nothing time – and that means sacrificing doing. It’s partly to do with age, partly to do with the fact that writing takes up a lot of space in your...

Life wasn’t about becoming, was it? It was about being.

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be...

When I started ‘Case Histories,’ the characters were all going to Antarctica on a cruise. The first part was called ‘Embarkation.’ It was supposed to be about everyone preparing to embark on the cruise, but...

Then others must remember us.

The legacy of the fairy story in my brain is that everything will work out. In fiction it would be very hard for me, as a writer, to give a bad ending to a good...

The cult of the individual is killing us. I think Twitter signals the death of western civilisation, but people have been saying that since Demosthenes.

Sometimes it was harder to change the past than it was the future.

But I, you know, if I could choose a period to go back to, I think I would like to live through the Blitz. ‘Cause you do read so many accounts of people saying they’re...

Louise was an urbanite, she preferred the gut-thrilling sound of an emergency siren slicing through the night to the noise of country birds at dawn. Pub brawls, rackety roadworks, mugged tourists, the badlands on a...

O passado é aquilo que transportamos connosco

‘Feminism’ is such an incredibly awkward word for us these days, isn’t it? Not to be feminist would be bizarre, wouldn’t it?

I think about death a lot, I really do, because I can’t believe I won’t exist. It’s the ego isn’t it? I feel that I should retreat into a better form of Zen Buddhism than...

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

He missed having a wild green world on his doorstep – no rabbits or pheasants or badgers.

Life is a very orderly thing, but in fiction there is a huge liberation and freedom. I can do what I like. There’s nothing that says I can’t write a page of full stops. There...

This was their third bar since Piccadilly and they were both agreed that the two of them were very drunk but had the capacity to get a good deal drunker yet.

The past is a cupboard full of light and all you have to do is find the key that opens the door.

I did feel when my mother died if anyone was going to haunt me it would be her. And she hasn’t, so I think it is possibly the end.

I spent four years doing a doctorate in postmodern American literature. I can recognize it when I see it.

A novel and its writer are inseparable: you are your books. A play’s not like that at all. ‘Abandonment’s not mine – it’s everyone’s. I wanted it to be a co-operative thing because I was...

Or was it, as everyone told her, and as she must believe, all in her head? And so what if it was – wasn’t everything in her head real too? What if there was no...

Probably not needing to be published would give me more time to think about a book.

On the outside of the bedroom door there was a plaque that said Valerie. On the way up, Jackson noticed that other bedrooms also had names – Eleanor, Lucy, Anna, Charlotte.Jackson wondered how you decided...

The past is what you take with you.

I’ve always loved mysteries, the something there that you didn’t know, and with ‘Case Histories’ I just decide to make that more up-front.

She should have done science, not spent all her time with her head in novels. Novels gave you a completely false idea about life, they told lies and they implied there were endings when in...

I find the past so fascinating. Photographs are strange, almost surreal, almost here yet gone. I slip into thinking what the past must have been like and I enjoy creating that ambience and atmosphere –...

Fairy tales opened up a door into my imagination – they don’t conform to the reality that’s around you as a child. I started reading when I was three and read everything, but I wanted...

In the end, it is my belief, words are the only things that can construct a world that makes sense.

Alternate history fascinates me, as it fascinates all novelists, because ‘What if?’ is the big thing.

History is all about ‘what ifs

He had been very keen on Esperanto, which had seemed an absurd eccentricity at the time but now Ursula thought it might be a good thing to have a universal language, as Latin had once...

If you don’t have a unique voice, then you’re not really a writer.

I mean what else is there for a woman to do if she doesn’t want to go from the parental to the marital home with nothing in between? ‘An educated woman,’Millie amended. ‘An educated woman,’...

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I’m slightly mystified by creative writing courses – God love them – because I can’t understand how you can explain a process that I...

Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a...

It was the kind of summer evening that made Ursula want to be alone. ‘Oh,’ Izzie said, ‘You’re at an age when a girl is simply consumed by the sublime.’ Ursula wasn’t sure what she...

Not being published would be great. When I say that to other writers they look at me as if I’m totally insane.

Secrets had the power to kill a marriage,she said. Nonsense, Sylvie said,it was secrets that could save a marriage.

Ursula craved solitude but she hated loneliness